It is 1987 and a small Irish community is preparing for a wedding. The day before the ceremony a group of young friends, including bride and groom, drive out to the beach. There is an accident. Three survive, but three are killed.
The lives of the families are shattered and the rifts between them are felt throughout the small town. Connor is one of the survivors. But staying among the angry and the mourning is almost as hard as living with the shame of having been the driver. He leaves the only place he knows for another life, taking his secrets with him. Travelling first to Liverpool, then London, he makes a home - of sorts - for himself in New York. The city provides shelter and possibility for the displaced, somewhere Connor can forget his past and forge a new life.
But the secrets, the unspoken longings and regrets that have come to haunt those left behind will not be silenced. And before long, Connor will have to confront his past.
Graham Norton's powerful and timely novel of emigration and return demonstrates his keen understanding of the power of stigma and secrecy - with devastating results.***
It was Bill Lawlor who found him first. 1987, 1
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(@HodderBooks, 6 October 2020, 241 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I got an ARC of Home Stretch and I'm sorry it took me so long to get around to reading. Like Norton's other novels, this is an incredible book with much darker undercurrents than it would initially appear. The true darkness isn't revealed until almost at the end of the novel, almost thirty years after the accident when the truth of that awful night and the lives changed forever is revealed. I cried a lot reading this because the character's and their lives grew to mean so much to me.
